The Canadian Film Institute is proud to present the work of the inventive, influential, critically acclaimed filmmaker, William D. MacGillivray. In addition to his numerous film festival awards over the years, in 2013 he received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts for his extraordinary contributions to Canada’s moving image culture.

Since being a founding member of the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-operative in Halifax in 1974, MacGillivray has personified the spirit of independent, artist-driven filmmaking in Canada. His film and television work, in both fiction and documentary modes, is searching, cinematically sophisticated, consistently challenging and intelligent.

Born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1946, MacGillivray studied art at Concordia University and film at the London Film School. Since the late 1970s, he has written, directed, and produced some of the most important films in contemporary Canadian cinema. Starting with Aerial View (1979), as writer-director he has made six feature fiction films: Stations (1983), Life Classes (1987), The Vacant Lot (1989), Understanding Bliss (1991), and Hard Drive (2013).

MacGillivray’s fiction films explore ideas of identity – personal, national, cultural – in a world increasingly dominated by mass media and technological communication systems controlled by those who live far from his characters, in distant urban ‘centres.’ He depicts characters striving to locate themselves, to speak with their own voices, and to discover the quietly radical idea that the ‘centre’ they are often told is elsewhere just might be where they are.

These ideas also animate MacGillivray’s impressive catalogue of feature documentary works: I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1988), For Generations To Come (1994), Reading Alistair MacLeod (2005), Silent Messengers (2005), and The Man of A Thousand Songs (2010).

Elegant, artful, and accomplished, his is a cinema of reflective, subtle, utterly conscious exploration. The Canadian Film Institute is honoured to present the work of William D. MacGillivray as part of its Enlightened Screen series.